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The text attempts to read Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej by Michał Witkowski in the context of the post-modern conviction on the exhaustion of creative capabilities of literature. To this effect, it references both theories contributing to the paradigm of postmodernism, including Francis Lyotard’s “collapse of grand narratives”, and concepts directly referencing the literary output, such as “the literature of exhaustion”, “banalism” or “spoiled literature”. The article examines how these decadent tendencies have affected the construction of individual segments of the novel; beginning from sentences, through plot and the protagonist, to the message of the work. A key aspect seems to be (in accordance with John Barth’s postulate) an attempt to “feed” on what is considered to be “burnt-out”. Witkowski deliberately emphasizes elements considered to be the most worn out. He carries ultimate forms to the extreme. By creating their negatives (e.g. a negative of plot, sentence, message), the author manages to get – at least partially – outside the thematized exhaustion.
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This text is an attempt at interpreting the photographs depicting SS officers captured in the moments of holiday relax. After fulfilling their everyday duties in Auschwitz, the SS men – in Höcker’s pictures from his album – rest, walk, joke, sing, feast and flirt with women; they are cheerful, smiling and carefree. The study of the album – revealed only in 2007, consisting of 116 pictures taken between June and December 1944 – is an impossible study, a study of silence, of commenting voices, a study spread between black and white, photography and the world, words and aphonia, hell and its background. It is the account of helplessness – of the gaze, language and understanding.
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The article presents an unofficial discussion that took place between one of the most prominent Polish critics of the late 19th century and Antoni Lange, a raising poet of the 90s, whose work had gained little attention from the older colleague. Mentioned briefly in Chmielowski’s Współczesni poeci polscy in 1895, Lange responded to some of the critic’s fterwards. Chmielowski did not respond to that directly, however, his review of Lange’s volume of poetry published at the time and the will to defend his claims using the adversary’s poetry as a pretext shows that the young poet had succeeded in provoking the respected critic to take defensive position. The two writers, discussing an ongoing ‘crisis’ of poetry, present their own perspectives on the roots of the situation. Chmielowski’s claims from the beginning of the 20th century prove that the dispute, unofficial as it was, was won by Antoni Lange.
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Hermann Burger, a consummate ‘artist with language’, chronicles the existential troubles of strange eccentrics in dizzyingly, labyrinthine lengthy sentences which are crammed with foreign words and neologisms. Burger is considered to be one of the most original and most controversial writers in contemporary German-Swiss literature. This essay focuses on selected stories of Burger and characterises their protagonists, who are either mentally or physically handicapped or else highly gifted and cranky and who tell of their lives in orgiastic verbal tirades. Their attempts to overcome the barriers separating them from the external world fail and this eventually leads to their mental or physical death. This analysis emphasises both the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of Hermann Burger’s prose as well as certain autobiographical elements in it. Burger was overcome by own mental suffering to the extent that in 1989 he took his own life.
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Statement comes to mind almost during every war, when the only trick is efficient use of the weapon. After all, it happens that the atmosphere of war triggers in people poetic talents, painting, satirical. It turned out that these " silent muse" functioned as an additional weapon in the fight against the enemy. Polish underground work has been included in the tasks that dealt with the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army Headquarters ( BIP ). They began to organize evenings in which recite poetry contests for songs and poetry, which were then printed in the underground press. More and more often in private homes screened theaters, concerts were arranged, and in secret university educated future musicians, visual artists. During these 63 days written dozens of poems, songs, held more than 50 meetings with actors of stage, several puppet theater performances for children, music concerts, they have been given several hundred broadcasts of Polish Radio, as well as radio Army "Lightning". During the Warsaw Uprising appeared in about 167 newspapers insurgent, printed some posters, a series of postage stamps and other emblems.
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The article is an attempt to read Franz Kafka’s texts in the light of findings includedin the article of the 20th-century philosopher and sociologist of religion, Jacob Taubes. ForTaubes, Kafka’s key figure is exclusion, a phenomenon of alienness of characters createdby the author of The Castle. “Kafka describes the world from the perspective of an outsider,who is desperately seeking the acceptance of the world”, he wrote. In this article, thephilosopher’s words will be verified. The basic question is whether Taubes as the messianicbard of the revolution (whose presence in the national philosophical reflection becamebelatedly increasingly noticeable) does not use too radical simplification in his laconicinterpretation of Kafka’s writing.
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The article focuses upon Kazimiera Szczuka’s long interview with Maria Janion, locating it in the context of women’s autobiographies published in the 21st century Poland. The book under study – Trances – Traumas – Transgressions – is a part of an interesting publishing venture under a collective title of “The Rose Series”. The series presents biographies of active women: feminists, women who have made a significant contribution to Polish scholarship and science, culture, arts or politics. In her study, the author endeavors to single out particular trends characterizing the genre of the woman’s autobiography in Poland in relation to the central concerns of the feminist thought. It is against such a backdrop that she proceeds to demonstrate the uniqueness of “The Rose Series”. Her argument leads to a reflection upon whether or not it is possible to claim the emergence of a new way of constructing a woman’s autobiography in the Polish cultural discourse. To answer such a question, the author juxtaposes the ‘masculine point of reference’ – determining the ‘traditional’ direction of the process of autobiography construction – against the network of reference central to the construction of a woman’s autobiography, and sets some of Maria Janion’s statements and observations against stereotypes concerning social and cultural roles of the woman in the Polish context.
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The main task of this article is to enter into discussion with a concept of modernism as an expressive dimension of modernity by Susan Stanford Friedman. In place of statements of epistemological nature, the author of the article proposes ontological questions and return to such an understanding of modernism which would primarily stress a specific Anglo-Saxon modernity. This kind of a historically motivated definition should protect the coherence of modernism as a research subject.
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This essay sketches in broad outline the literary work of the German-language author Zsuzsanna Gahse, which is characterized by a variety of linguistic and formal experiments, particular attention being paid to her activity as a translator of Hungarian literature. At the centre of the discussion is Gahse’s literary portrait Translated. A Disunity, in which she reflects on writing and translating, but also takes as a theme her ‘disunity’ between literature and the graphic arts. Gahse found a way out of this ‘disunity’ by blurring the distinctions between different languages, media, genres and cultures in her works, by mediating in various ways between them and by ‘transferring’ them, for translating – as she always emphasizes – means very much more than simply mediating between two languages.
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This article analyzes four letters sent by Mother Maria (Elizaveta Kuzmina-Karavayeva,Skobtsova by marriage) to her mother Sofia Pilenko during the Second World War. Two of thoseletters were written in Fort Romainville, a Nazi concentration camp located in France and the othertwo in Ravensbrück, a concentration camp in Germany. The letters are not only a document of theirera but also an important link in the process of discovering biographical details describing one ofthe most difficult periods of the future saint’s life and the inhumane conditions she had experiencedbefore she died in a gas chamber. The letters written by Mother Maria in a cryptic way illustrateeveryday life in the camp and express her worries about the fate of her loved ones, especially her sonYuri Skobtsov, arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in the concentration camp with his mother.The letters also describe her concerns about her mother, Sofia Pilenko, who due to old age and deepemotional bond with her daughter experienced a lot of distress during their separation and lost herhope for the improvement of their fate.
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The considerations made ??in the article concern the image of Vilnius in the prose of GrigoryKanovich, a writer, who in all his previous works remains faithful to the Jewish Lithuania, whichhe remembers from his childhood. The story of Kanovich entitled Dream o f Jerusalem, which nolonger exists has been carefully analyzed. The post-war Jerusalem of North is undoubtedly thecenter of the Jewish ethnos, a mythical place, unique, admirable, but also a place of disappointments,broken dreams, a city full of shed tears and marked by bloody events of the war. The themeof dream present in the work is at the same time longing for freedom, return to the ideal past, butalso a symbol of fear and memory of the place which will never be the same again.
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In the following article the motif of journey, as present in novel Nigdje, niotkuda by the Bosnian author BekimSejranovic, is being analyzed. The protagonist‟s constant changes of dwelling-places are interpreted as a journey towards self-knowledge.
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Między interpretacją a użyciem
Elfriede Jelinek is a well-known author in Poland, she is an icon for many polish male and female writers, who read and interpretate her books in their own ways, with many refractions. This paper is a case study about how Michał Witkowski a young polish writer (1975) reads her books and uses her image in his literary works, interviews and new media. Especially in his novel "Zbrodniarz i dziewczyna" [A criminal and a girl] he is interested in a symbol/icon Elfriede Jelinek, not really in her writings. His work is an interesting literary tribute and an example of misreading.
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The paper is an attempt to interpret the work of Krystyna Miłobędzka, one of the most celebrated contemporary Polish poets, in terms suggested by the ideas of the community of readers as well as the institution of the poetry reading understood as a phenomenological/communal event. The analysis is informed by the recently published volume znikam jestem [I disappear I exist], a record of four poetry readings given by Miłobędzka between 2000 and 2010.
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The article is an attempt to apply the theoretical and analytical tools derived from ecocriticism and the environmental studies, in the analyses of the literature of the Holocaust. The author proposes a thesis that a full recognition of the role of non-human factors (non-humans), such as nature, landscape, climate, plants and animals became only possible after the anthropocentric paradigm in the humanities have been overcome and a new, supra-species kind of “agency”—elaborated from the theory of Brunon Latour—became widespread. The principal part of the essay contains the analyses of the role of landscape, organic and inorganic nature in the autobiographical prose of Piotr Rawicz, Henryk Grynberg and Wilhelm Dichter. In all of the studied writings nature assumes the function of an ethical subject and additionally the role of anti-historical narration.
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The article offers the reading of Michał Androsiuk’s "Biały koń", "Wagon drugiej klasy" in the context of remembrance, addressing the question of identity of Belarusians in Podlasie region. A borderland town of Hajnówka becomes the place where individual and collective memory, History, and imagination intersect. Finally, it appears that the long-lasting cohesive national identity, while grounded on false premises, might prove to be more tempting or convenient than the complex, equivocal frontier past.
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Metaphors and comparisons are typical features of the ancient texts describing celestial bodies, and they can be treated as a part of a broader cultural practice of seeking analogies between earth and sky phenomena, inspired by the microcosm/macrocosm theory. To explain such a practice we can refer to the modern theory of imagination as well, according to which appreciation of nature is based, among others, on the so-called “projective imagination”, transferring mentally the images from the terrestrial reality to the sky. One of the obvious instances of such an analogical thinking is “katasterismos”, mythic narration about the item placed in the heavens as a star or constellation. It appears that among the objects on the sky described as a result of “catasterism” we can find some specimens of jeweller’s craftsmanship (e.g. Ariadne’s Crown as Corona Borealis). This is, however, a specific situation; astronomical descriptions usually emphasize the brightness and perfection of the sky phenomena using above-mentioned poetic devices associated with jewellery. Most popular among them is the metaphoric epithet of “gold”, linked commonly with stars and the sun, but besides this, in the works of Roman authors can be detected more original imagery (e.g. the cosmos as a necklace). It is argued in the paper that this kind of astronomical descriptions can be interpreted against the backdrop of the history of the “visual metaphors of value”, as they were defined by Ernst Gombrich.
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The paper discusses the functioning of emigration theme in the poetry of Leo Gomolitzky(1903-1988) - one of the greatest representative of Russian diaspora in Poland before World WarII. Some poetical texts and two poems (Warsaw, The emigre poem) has been analized in it, in thecontext of bilingualism, exterritoriality and biculturalism - categories, that had a strong influenceon Gomolitzky’s life and works.In the analized texts Gomolitzky shows his own experiences and thoughts caused by theemigration, he also diagnoses people’s attitudes toward exile. From the viewpoint of the poet theemigration is, undoubtedly, the catastrophe, but at the same time Gomolitzky interpretates it as a chanceof the moral renewal, spiritual rebirth.
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The article addresses issues pertaining to the laudatory works. The author is interestedin the manner the nineteenth-century poets looked at the figure of Alojzy Feliński —a poet, reformer, husband, father and friend, and thus, the manner they perceived himboth in the public and private sphere. The following poems have been adopted as thebasis for considerations: Konstanty Piotrkowski’s Oda na śmierć Alojzego Felińskiego,Wincenty Turski’s Do cieniów Alozjego Felińskiego, Tymon Zaborowski’s WestchnieniePodolanina, mieszkańca gór miodoborskich, po śmierci Alojzego Felińskiego, and GrzegorzIgnacy Szadbeja’s Elegia na śmierć Felińskiego. The conducted analysis and interpretationare intended not only to depict the portrait of Feliński as presented by the nineteenthcenturypoets, but also became an attempt to contain the discussed works in the sphere ofa new type of laudatory poems. For we obtain an example of a noble model correspondingwith the new manner of understanding the artist and the citizen that has contributedto the national culture and education. The authors of the poems, faithful to the classicor sentimental trend, emphasize the qualities of Feliński (diligence, talent, pragmatismand service to society), that are worthy of public praise. The primary purpose of theundertaken considerations is to demonstrate the changes occurring in the field of poeticsand rhetoric of laudatory works, which are a kind of poetic tribute within the category ofdidactic approval of the Enlightenment period, as an instrument forming personal modelsand inspiring positively valorized social behaviors.
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